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User blog:Mr. Bambu/XCOM Calc: Blaster Launcher Makes Things Dead
Premise Basically, this thing is a badass weapon and needs a calculation. Described as an "outdoor toy", it destroys pretty much anything within its radius, up to and including huge portions of UFOs. Even soldiers on the outermost rim of the explosion will be killed (probably). Anything closer to the epicenter, unarmored, is almost certainly doomed to die. This is my first calc of this kind, so bear with me. My apologies if it is wrong. Let's begin. The Calc This should be simple enough, much like all of my calcs. I am a calc noob, after all. So, from that page I linked above, we find that the blast radius is 11 "blocks", which look to me like meters. Here's an image, for reference. Basically, plug in this value of 11.5 meters (the shot from the Blaster Launcher lands in a block- therefore including an extra half meter on radius on either side). Plugging that into the equation for the volume of a sphere (4/3 pi x radius^3), we get 6370.63 meters cubed. We will halve this though, as no crater is made, so destruction purely affects above ground. We will only calculate for this. So... 3185.315 meters cubed. Personally, an explosion of this caliber looks like Pulverization to me, but I'd cede Violent Fragmentation. I'll include an image of an area affected with a Blaster Launcher below to give an idea of the affect it has. So. Let's do this. Method 1: Violent Fragmentation We see that the explosion is able to destroy steel walls at any distance, and often firearms and armor dropped by soldiers killed by it are completely destroyed. That said, we will use the value for Steel in these calculations as that is the maximum known material that can be destroyed. 568.5 j/cc x 3185315000 cm^3 = 1.811 x 10^12 Joules (Multi-City Block level) Method 2: Pulverization Once again, we will use steel. For this, we will use all ends of the Pulverization values (Low End: 310 j/cc, Mid End: 655 j/cc, High End: 1000 j/cc- this seems most likely, as the "steel" of this verse is incredibly powerful and is probably comparable if not laughably superior to real-world steel). Low-End: 310 j/cc x 3185315000 cm^3 = 9.875 x 10^11 Joules (Multi-City Block level) Mid-End: 655 j/cc x 3185315000 cm^3 = 2.086 x 10^12 Joules (Multi-City Block level) High-End: 1000 j/cc x 3185315000 cm^3 = 3.185 x 10^12 Joules (Multi-City Block level) Tallies TL:DR, the weapon is 8-A all around (assuming I did this right). This is an expected outcome- the weapon is vastly superior to pretty much every other weapon of the verse, and can deal considerable damage to pretty much anything in the verse. If it doesn't flat out kill what it touches, then that's surprising. Violent Fragmentation Method- Blaster Launcher Causes Havoc: 1.811 x 10^12, Multi-City Block level Pulverization Method- Blaster Launcher Causes Havoc (Low-End): 9.875 x 10^11, Multi-City Block level Pulverization Method- Blaster Launcher Causes Havoc (Mid-End): 2.086 x 10^12, Multi-City Block level Pulverization Method- Blaster Launcher Causes Havoc (High-End): 3.185 x 10^12, Multi-City Block level Category:XCOM Category:Blog posts